I'm looking for a strategy to employ to manage my client side dhtml forms where there are a large number of possible choices being fed from a database. On the forms, you got something like:

<select id='EmployeeName' name='EmployeeName'>
<option value='1'>Chris</option>
<option value='2'>Fred</option>
....
<option value='9999'>Hank</option>
</select>

The values for the dropdown list are being pulled from a database and (currently) written out via a server side script to generate the necessary html. Needless to say, as the list gets larger and larger, the download times for the page starts to get longer and longer. Given that most of the time when the user downloads the page, the field is not even changed, it represents an excessive performance penalty.

I'm leaning towards using an invisible popup window that populates the list on demand (user hits a button or enters the field), that would allow the field to be populated after the page is initially displayed - using JavaScript to perform the feat. But before pursuing that route, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if there's a better way of doing things.

Thanks.